05 February 2006

Hatchet Guy Dead

The Hilter youth who tried to kill folks, first with a hatchet and then with a gun, in a gay bar the other night in New Bedford, Massachusetts, is dead. Story here. He died of a gunshot wound to the head received during a shootout with police in Norfolk, Arkansas. That came after he had killed a young woman acquaintance of his and a police officer during a traffic stop in Gassville, Arkansas.

A moral to this story for the more wacko among us: The ones you think will do your dirty work -- shooting homos, blowing up abortion clinics, lynching blacks, burning churches, killing talk-radio hosts -- are the same ones who will kill peace officers and innocent bystanders, maybe even of your own group. Stop admiring the Eric Rudolphs and Jacob Robidas for accomplished something you lack the gumption to do. They are not admirable. They are just criminals.

Nazism and similar isms are basically criminal enterprises engaged in without restraint, regardless of whether the ostensible politics are left-wing or right-wing. What is it that Nazis, Stalinists, Islamacists, even some Christianists, etc., want more than anything else? To decide who lives and who dies at their whim, without the law, or rules, of process, of humans. Their laws, rules, processes are ordained either by what they think of as historical inevitability or by their private self-proclaimed pipeline to the Divine and its will.

A hatchet attack in a gay bar in New Bedford is pretty much the same as a beheading in Bagdhad. Bombing an abortion clinic is not unlike bombing the Olymics. Burning Baptist churches in Alabama is no different than setting embassies on fire in Syria. These are the acts of criminals, not freedom fighters or those with a right to act on their indignations.